SUNDAY – as simple as music should sound

The Berlin based trio, headed by the Swiss-American double bass player Simon Quinn accompanied by the German singer Zola Mennenöh and the Greek guitarist Charis Karantzas, has an unusual instrumentation which implies subtle and harmonious melodic twines generated by the meticulous interpretation of the written parts opposed to the elegance of improvised musical bits.
This all, the compositions, the musicians and their overall developed interplay in this trio, underlines a warm and throughout balanced expressivity of a chamber musical ambience.

How it all started

It all started in 2007 as the festival Oggimusica (Switzerland) commissioned /q3_a musicians' collective/ to write and perform a new soundtrack to Robert Flaherty's silent film /Nanook of the North/. Simon Quinn - member of the commissioned collective - found himself writing the music to the opening scenes of Flaherty's masterpiece: “The mysterious Barren Lands - desolate, boulder strewn, wind-swept - illimitable spaces which top the world.” - as the first caption describes the following screen, depicting a vast floating ice filed in the light of the setting sun upon the arctic ocean.

Composing soundtracks and scenes

Few years later, inspired and motivated by the success of the new soundtrack - which has been performed in various occasions in Switzerland and Italy, featuring among others Kurt Rosenwinkel, Max DeAloe and Oliver Illi - and the growing personal interest in film music, Simon Quinn started to compose single “musical sketches”, or as he entitled them: Scenes.

The scenes: soundtracks without movie

The compositions, simply entitled Scena I to XV, were written with the intention to inspire the listener to picture his own image sequences.
The music is given and its non influential nomenclature, as well as the absence of sung lyrics, leave complete freedom of choice in ones repertoire of pictures and memories, lets them be carried away, accompanied and set in motion by the consonant melodies, rhythmic counterpoints and light harmonies.

Writing schema

A further compositional “rule” Simon Quinn set himself writing these musical sketches, was to start and conclude the compositional as well as the writing process of each Scene within one hour of work - anything that took longer than the self-imposed time frame was not accepted in this set of compositions, nor were subsequent changes allowed.
The concept behind these “restrictions” was to preserve and assure that the slightest spark of inspiration for each Scene would keep its genuineness and would not be consumed in hours of compositional and musical development - neither while writing nor performing.

Constant interaction

As simple and fleetingly as a memory can be, SUNDAY's music simply wants to recall that glimpse in order to explicitly have the listener be part of the musical environment and actively hear and react to it.